The UK’s vicious measures against migrants (AWTWNS 9 February 2015)

This AWTWNS news packet for the week of 9 February 2015 contains one article. It may be reproduced or used in any way, in whole or in part, as long as it is credited.

Web site: aworldtowinns.co.uk

To subscribe or for back issues: http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/AWorldToWinNewsService/

Write to us – send us information, comments, criticisms, suggestions and articles: aworldtowinns@yahoo.co.uk

The UK’s vicious measures against migrants

9 February 2015. A World to Win News Service. Immigration has become a paramount issue on the UK political scene and in the debate among the political representatives of its ruling class.

Migrants from all over the world, especially the Middle East and Africa, have been trying to enter the UK to find work for decades. The number of new immigrants from outside the European Union is down by more than a third since its peak a decade ago, while the yearly number of new immigrants from European countries, especially Eastern Europe, has increased tremendously (to 92,000), even though these figures are still lower than non-EU immigrants (168,000). Between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million people came to live in the UK.

For the politicians of the UK’s main political parties, using this issue – in fact, making it the huge issue that it is – has been one of the main ways they have sought to shape public opinion.

The major political parties have targeted both European and non-European immigrants. This article mainly examines the vitriol directed against EU immigrants. Because they have the same rights and are entitled to the same benefits as UK citizens, they are being blamed for the long queues for an appointment in the public health system and unavailable public housing. Along with immigrants in general they are accused of being responsible for overloaded public transport and all sorts of other social ills, as well as some things that are not really problems at all, such as increasing ethnic and linguistic diversity in London and some other cities. Concerns about cultural affronts to “English identity” are given a hearing.

These parties have been trying to outmatch each other with their plans to limit immigration to the UK. All this not only has resulted in a draconian anti-immigrant policy but also has given rise to the openly racist political figure Nigel Farage and his party UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party). Farage, a member of the European Parliament, and his party have gained support in some Conservative Party (Tory) strongholds in south and south-east England. In the May 2014 European Parliament election, UKIP won nearly a third of the seats from the UK, with more votes than any other party. This was the first time a party other than Labour or the Conservatives has won the popular vote in a national election since 1906. In recent months, some high-ranking Conservatives left their party for UKIP.

The thrust of UKIP’s programme is “putting Britain first” by taking it out of the European Union and stopping most immigration. Farage is famous for a rhetoric that blames immigration for everything wrong in the UK, including unemployment, crime, anti-Semitism, housing shortages, the situation in the National Health Service and the general deterioration of the welfare state. He has also complained of foreign languages being spoken on public transportation, and even blamed the number of immigrants for a traffic jam that caused him to almost miss a party conference.

The UKIP, while more deliberately provocative in its rhetoric, is a product of the anti-immigration campaign by the other three main parties, which promoted anti-immigrant and British chauvinist rhetoric and policies before the UKIP was founded. Now these mainstream parties are using the political threat posed by UKIP as an excuse to compete with it and each other in stoking backward and racist sentiments among the population.

The Labour Party led by Tony Blair during their time in government in the l990s and 2000s introduced some of the most draconian restrictions against immigration. In a 2005 speech, Blair said among his proudest achievements were cutting the number of asylum applications by two-thirds and almost tripling deportations. Despite sometimes trying to play the “nice guy” role when they were not running the government, Labour has jumped completely into this nasty current campaign. Even though party leader Ed Miliband likes to point out that he is the son of immigrants when that suits him, he recently declared that the “concerns” of UKIP supporters “most of the time aren’t based on prejudice, they’re based on reality.” Here he was echoing Conservative (Tory) Prime Minister David Cameron, who had said Farage’s “concerns” were his too.

Because Labour is supposed to represent the working people, Miliband had to add the claim that immigrants drive down wages and say that he “championed openness and diversity”, but the “system’s not working” – meaning the immigration system. What that means was revealed in a Labour leaflet left in letter boxes all over the country that denounced the Tories for “losing control over our borders” and promising to rid public services of people who don’t “speak English properly”. When he became prime minister, Cameron promised to slash overall immigration by eighty percent. Now Labour is blasting him, not for making that reactionary promise, but for failing to deliver on it.

Both the Tories and Labour, who implemented drastic cutbacks in government spending for social services, want to blame the dire results in health, education, housing and other areas on the “flood” of immigrants and especially immigrants from the EU. So Cameron and his government came up with a plan to cut or limit most of those services to EU citizens who come to the UK seeking jobs, including both unemployment benefits and other benefits for those who have jobs. (The percentage of immigrants who work is much higher than that of the non-immigrant working age population.) He also said his government wanted to deport EU workers who remained jobless for more than six months, although he acknowledged that such a measure would be illegal without renegotiating the EU treaties his country has signed.

It is extremely unlikely that all the other EU countries would agree to dropping the right of citizens of one member country to live and work in all the others, which is supposed to be a pillar of the European Union itself, along with the free movement of capital and the open market for merchandise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European government officials have made it clear that they will not allow the UK to pick and choose which EU foundational principles to follow.

In his speech in Staffordshire towards the end of last year, Cameron retreated from declaring an “emergency stop” to immigration or putting a cap on the number of migrants, as government officials have repeatedly proposed. Instead he said he would reduce the flow of immigrants from Europe by reducing alleged “incentives” to immigration. However, he included a threat that UK might leave the EU if these conditions are not accepted by other EU countries, saying, “If our concerns fall on deaf ears and we cannot put our relationship with the EU on a better footing, then of course I rule nothing out.” Cameron had previously scheduled a referendum on whether or not the UK should leave the EU for 2017; now he says he wants to hold it next year.

The UK’s exit from the European Union is no longer considered impossible. Although there are divergent assessments on whether this would be advantageous, acceptable or disastrous for British capital, this debate itself is new. After all, it was the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher who brought Great Britain into the EU. Whether the UK leaves the EU or uses that threat to renegotiate its legal commitments, or even ends up changing nothing at all in this relationship, still it seems that anti-EU (and anti-foreigner) public opinion is being whipped up by the three major parties to strengthen the British ruling classes’ hand in any eventuality.

These threats to op out seem to indicate that the UK is moving in an opposite direction from other EU countries and especially the 17-member eurozone (and above all Germany, along with France) that seek greater European economic integration.

Even if the UK’s membership in the EU were replaced by a joint UK-EU free trade zone or some other economic treaties, still such a momentous move would both reflect and accelerate major divergences among the Western imperialist countries. At the least this situation reveals something about the volatility of international relations these days.

Why are they doing this?

The real statistics show that Cameron and other British politicians are lying about the role that migrants could play and have played in destination countries such as the UK. Even the most restricted claims that immigrants pose short-term budgetary problems for the UK are false. “As Katja Hall, deputy director-general of the confederation of British Industry says: ‘Immigration has helped to keep the wheels of this recovery turning by plugging skills shortages and allowing UK firms to grow'”, a commentator wrote in the Observer (30 November 2014).

According to the same source, a study by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London indicates that migrants added 20 billion pounds to the UK economy in the decade up to 2011, and that migrants from the EU paid significantly more in British taxes than they claimed in benefits.

The Guardian recently reported that 30,000 British nationals are claiming unemployment benefits in countries across the EU. This makes a mockery of the arguments made by Cameron and his counterparts. Even worse for Cameron’s credibility, British “claimants in richer EU states outnumber those from the same countries in the UK. British claimants in Ireland outnumber Irish claimants by five to one and Germans by four to one. And many Brits get far better benefits in other EU states than they would here.” (Guardian, 21 January 2015)

Cameron, his Deputy Prime Minister (Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats Party), Miliband and Farage know all this. They hide the statistics, or use misleading statistics, to shape the conversation around the terms they want to set.

The same cynicism, lies and cruelty that the UK authorities display toward European immigrants is multiplied many times over when it comes to migrants from the Middle East and African countries under Western imperialist domination. While they face much harsher and even more hostile treatment from UK authorities than European immigrants, no one can argue that the UK economy does not need these migrants, too. Despite the ugly campaign against immigrants, successive UK governments have had to admit many thousands of immigrants from dominated countries every year, and this hasn’t stopped under the Cameron premiership.

The UK government may not have complete control but they have at least a rough control over who to admit and how many to admit into the UK. And they admit the number of immigrants or refugees according to their need to adjust their work force and population growth. They have their structures and mechanisms for this, and are not ashamed to resort to the most brutal behaviour to regulate the situation. This includes deportation of immigrants, or detention and prison where instead of working they waste their lives. Other immigrants are forced to live clandestinely. Some people leave everything and go back home, often at great risk, because the UK government delays people endlessly rather than giving a quick response to asylum requests, for instance. Many people receive automatic phone messages telling them to leave the country immediately or face arrest – and this has happened to people who have been citizens for decades.

Uncounted thousands of people seeking work have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in overloaded boats not fit to sail across these waters. But now the European powers, with the UK taking the public initiative, have announced that they will drastically cut back on the sea rescue operations that have saved as many as 100,000 lives in one year. Italy, whose navy performed most of the recent rescue operations, will no longer act on the high seas. Under the new Operation Triton, Europe, comprising dozens of the world’s richest countries, will operate just seven boats and three aircraft to cover a million square miles of sea. Further, the main mission of these craft will not be to rescue people from drowning but to keep them from getting to Europe.

The UK took a step even further when its government announced it “would not support any future search and rescue operations, including Triton, claiming the assistance simply encourages more people to risk the crossing.” (Guardian, 27 October 2014) Many of those condemned to death at sea are refugees from countries the UK is playing an active role in devastating right now, such as Syria (the single biggest source of refugees), Sudan and Somalia, as well as other African countries. Cameron, perhaps more openly that any European head of government now in power, is essentially advocating and leading in the mass drowning of foreigners.

The UK establishment – the politicians, media and so on – is not just establishing reactionary policies. Nor are they just engaging in electoral politics. They are also legitimizing, encouraging and even imposing the most brutal, reactionary ideology, a way of thinking and feeling that is as dangerous as it is despicable.

The UK has at least as much responsibility as any other country in human history in terms of bringing misery to the world’s people over the past five centuries. The callous and instrumental way that representatives of the UK ruling class deal with European immigrants, and the savage atrocities they inflict far more widely, are two sides of the same “British” values and national interests said to be threatened by immigration.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.